Blanco Prawn Noodle House

A foodie much smarter than I once remarked that food should be felt and experienced and not chronicled or catalogued. On balance, I am inclined to agree, for the eater, gastronomy should as much about the journey as the destination… but I can’t help it. It somehow seems unpatriotic, un-​Singaporean, not to take pictures of your food, especially when it’s as pretty and aromatic a bowl as the folks at Blanco put together.
Ask about this deceptively simple dish and the responses are likely to be as robust and varied as the flavors embodied in the broth. Can something so simple really be perceived so many different ways? There is no easy answer, largely because Hokkien prawn noodle soup is not so much a bowl of food as a part of the Singapore story.* In short, no two prawn noodle experiences are alike, depending on your history, if any, with the dish. It is precisely because it is as foundational to Singaporean gastronomy and so much a part of Singapore’s own brief history, that Hokkien prawn noodle soup can be such an evocative food experience, and why everybody has their own backstory when it comes to this classic of Singaporean hawker fare. Food is as much about memory as it is about taste, food associated with fond memories will always taste far better than the ingredients or preparation can reasonably make it. The converse is equally true. I, for example, get a tightness between the shoulders and am overcome by a sense of resignation and malaise, every time I have green bean soup, the same feeling I used to get during night snacks in basic military training as a raw recruit, but I digress.
Blanco’s version of Hokkien prawn noodle soup has all the necessary ingredients for lush nostalgia. The broth is thick and brown, bearing the gravitas of slowly stewing roasted pork bones and the heady miasma of steeped prawn heads, shells and fish racks.
What you notice is the spicy, aromatic, almost nutmeg-​like sweet finish, cleansing your palate and waking it up at the same time and readying it for the next mouthful. Tasting this broth is like falling through a wormhole and coming up on the other side in a simpler time of street-​side dining, surrounded by family all perched precariously on rickety stools around a small folding table, their smiling faces just visible through the rising steam of bowls of Hokkien prawn broth, and your mother leaning over to offer you a spoonful of noodle and steamy broth, while you are distracted by a calico stray cat peering out from just beyond the corona of the pushcart noodle stall’s pressure gas lamp, eyes bright for the odd table scrap. The bustle of street traffic, the hiss of the pressure lamp and the boiling broth, the soundtrack to this lush visual memory.
More contemporary versions of Hokkien prawn noodle soup feature pork fat less prominently, which I find disturbing. That layer of pork fat that used to accompany more traditional servings of Hokkien prawn noodle soup was the perfect vessel for all those ancient and subtle flavors, the fat allowed these ethereal and volatile flavors to linger on the palate long enough to be appreciated. So, the lower the fat content, the less harmonious and more «one-​note» the broth becomes. Blanco has a very decent broth, it is bright without being two dimensional. Hokkien prawn noodle soup lives and dies on the broth alone. The noodles can be added if one is looking for a more substantial meal, but the broth has been traditionally even been served by itself with the addition of condiments such as bean sprouts, cilantro and kang kong. Blanco has also faithfully adhered to the traditional addition of chunks of pig tail, something that you don’t find all that often any more. In my book, the folks at Blanco deserve a place in my Hall of Hallowed Gastronomy because of this one thing. The skin and fat fall off the bone and you slurp and suck your way around the tail bone till its clean. If you’re ordering the 3-​in-​1 prawn noodle soup, then enjoy the ribs which are fall off the bone tender with the flesh rapidly dissolving in your mouth once off the bone. There’s also wonderfully gelatinous pig skin which is reminiscent of sea cucumber, except porkier. Cleanse with a mouthful of broth and repeat, and repeat and repeat. There are a few other details that you are likely to remember, the alkaline starch of the yellow noodles, the crunch of fresh blanched sprouts, the herbal and almost floral heat of the fresh cut chilies, and the taste of ocean from the prawn flesh, but none of these details, will cling, almost parasitic, in your memory like that the memory of that deep dark broth, whispering secrets going down.
* For an excellent summary of what this dish is and its roots, read Bonny Tan’s excellent writeup on Infopedia (
).